Camp X
The Secret base located in Whitby Ontario, where secret agents were trained during World War II
December 6, 2006 was the 65th Anniversary of Camp X
Sir William Stephenson also known as the ‘Quiet Canadian’. In 1976, author Mr. William Stevenson published a hagiography of Sir William Stephenson, The Man Called Intrepid.
Camp X, is located in Whitby.
Honoured for his wartime work, Stephenson was knighted by the British in the 1945 New Year's Honours List. In 1946 he received the Presidential Medal for Merit, the highest civilian award of the United States at the time of war. He was the first non-US citizen to receive the medal.
General Donovan presented Stephenson with the award and the citation paid tribute to his "invaluable assistance to America in the fields of intelligence and special operations".
Camp X web site:
Camp X
Photograph of Camp X above,
use, courtesy Lynn Phillip Hodgson
Memories
"As a child, growing up in Whitby near the Lake Ontario site of Camp X in the 50's and 60's, one was always warned not to venture past the wooded area that you see in the above photographs. When walking along the beach, children often venture where they are not supposed to, but in this case, the warning was so strong that not once did I venture past those woods." jc
Camp X is the unofficial name given the training Camp located on the shore of Lake Ontario in Whitby, just east of Thickson's Road. It was operated as a World War II paramilitary and commando training installation.
Camp X was operated jointly by British Security Coordination (BSC) and the Government of Canada.
The official names of the camp were many: S 25-1-1 by the RCMP, Project-J by the Canadian military, and STS-103 (Special Training School 103) by the SOE (Special Operations Executive), a branch of the British intelligence service MI-6.
Camp X was established December 6, 1941 by the BSC's chief, Sir William Stephenson, a Canadian from Winnipeg, Manitoba and a close confidante of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The camp was first opened for the purpose of training American COI (forerunner to the CIA) agents to be dropped behind enemy lines as saboteurs and spies, at a time when the US was forbidden by an Act of Congress to be involved in World War Two.
One of the unique features of Camp X was Hydra, a highly sophisticated telecommunications centre. Given the name by the Camp X operators, Hydra was invaluable for both coding and decoding information in relative safety from the prying ears of German radio observers.
The camp was an excellent location for the safe transfer of code due to the topography of the land; Lake Ontario made it an excellent site for picking up radio signals from the UK.
Hydra also had direct access via land lines to Ottawa, New York and Washington for telegraph and telephone communications.
Camp X trained over five hundred Allied units of which 273 of these graduated and moved on to London for further training. Many secret agents were trained here.
The Camp X pupils were schooled in a wide variety of special techniques including silent killing, sabotage, partisan support & recruitment methods for resistance movements, demolition, map reading, skilled use of various weapons, and Morse code.
In the fall of 1945 Camp-X was used by the RCMP as a secure location for interviewing Soviet embassy cypher-clerk Igor Gouzenko who defected to Canada September 5 and revealed an extensive Soviet espionage operation operating in the country.
References * Inside Camp X by Lynn Philip Hodgson, with a foreword by Secret Agent 'Andy Durovecz (2003) - ISBN 0-9687062-0-7
Chancellor, Henry (2005). James Bond: The Man and His World. John Murray. ISBN 0-7195-6815-3.
Wikipedia
